A “plant-based tonic that has magical healing properties,” of course. Root beer with extra anise seeds and pine needles. (I wonder if there is a difference in performance between A&W, Dad’s, Barq’s, and Virgil’s.)

Could be. “Root beer” can be made from any number of plants and herbs. It’s be strangely appropriate if she’d used Pipsissewa (spotted wintergreen, “Prince’s Pine”) but that doesn’t grow around Minneapolis as far as I can tell. Eastern teaberry is also a wintergreen (one uses the leaves rather than the roots) and does grown in Minnesota, and birch bark (for “birch beer”) has a similar flavor and is widely available.

Eastern teaberry has a better/stronger flavor if the leaves are fermented for a few days… and of course a good root or birch “beer” deserves a bit of a ferment. Perhaps isn’t just snarky, but maybe just the weeeeee bit dis-inhibited by having had a slurp of a good home-brew?

This is funny. I just imagine the conflict of… well, “impressions” is probably the best word… going on in Pickle’s head. As a 30,000-year-old (or whatever it is) sentient blackthorn bush, there’s probably nothing about anatomy or sexuality that Castela didn’t encounter, but now she has to reconcile that with her 13-year-old parahuman existence. And it’s all happening so _fast_!

Well, she’s still very much a child. It’s a question of how much she was aware of when she was younger. She certainly didn’t remember the attack on her and Atsali when they were not much younger. And as a blackthorn bush, how much opportunities she might have had for closer observation?

if i remember correctly, the last time this happened it was because the site that hosts this comic, had their server farm under a few feet of water due to ?Katrina? i think… i would assume that this is probably something similar.

if one of those is Selkie, as i follow that one as well, that one is a snafu with the site “using too much bandwidth” so they shut it down… even though he’s completely paid up… probably to bump him up to the next tier of payment level.

Oh I know. That’s exactly why I say this. Literally millions of people are being displaced by this disaster. Going East isn’t a great idea at this time due to more flooding and North isn’t in the greatest state ether. That leaves West at this point and West Texas can really only be expected to hold so many people.

A few other comics are down because of the mess down South. It the storm acted like they normally do and just kept moving north instead of hovering over the coast we could have used a little bit of that water in North Texas. This sharp turn to the East seems to be the new thing for hurricanes. The weather here has been screwy for at least the last three years. Whether it’s Global Warming, El Niño or a combination the predictions are even further off than usual if that’s possible.